Creating New Documents

Now that you've completed your tour of the Word interface, it's
time to get to work. In the rest of this chapter, you'll learn the basic
techniques you need to create, open, edit, and save Word documents. In Chapter
4, "Quick and Effective Formatting Techniques," you'll build on
what you learn here, understanding how to format the text you've
created.

Let's start with creating new documents. As you've already seen,
Word opens with a blank document already displayed, ready for editing. At this
point, you have several choices:

You can start working in the blank document that's already open,
entering text and other elements. When you're ready, you can save the file
as either a Word document or a Web page. (See the "Saving Your
Documents" section, later in this chapter.)

You can start with one of Word's built-in templates, which may
already contain some of the text and much of the formatting you need.

You can create a blank Web page, email message, or XML page.

TIP

Any time you want to create a new blank document, the quickest way to do it
is to click the New button on the Standard toolbar or to use the keyboard
shortcut Ctrl+N.

These commands create a blank document based on Word's default Normal
template. If you use File, New instead, you can choose to create a
document based on a different template.